I, the Sun Read online

  When I was ushered into Kuwatna-ziti’s presence, in a hall before a closed room, I lunged at him, going for his throat.

  “Tasmi – What? Get out!” That last was to the servant who tried to aid him. He needed no aid. His fingers closed on my wrists and he pinned me up against the wall. “Stop it. Stop! That’s better. Now, what’s wrong? What happened to you?”

  With all my strength, I tried to twist my wrists from his grasp. Putting his knee in my belly, he held me against the wall. “You demon’s bastard, stop it! Tell me what’s wrong, or I’ll grind your –”

  “You know well enough what is wrong. ‘Shepherd’s pup,’ they are calling me.”

  “Where were you? What happened?”

  I told him, and he let me go. I rubbed my wrists, wondering how long it would be until I had such tricks of defensive skill as his.

  “When are you going to stop caring?’’ The Shepherd was grim. “I have had a bellyful of their feelings for you, myself. Look, you – I cannot leave here right now, and because of the way things are, I cannot invite you to join us. Come on.” And he led me away from the closed doors to the room Himuili had given him, extracting from me a promise to stay there until he came from his mysterious business with our host.

  “When are we leaving?” I sank down on the bed, tremors of unspent fury abating as I stretched out. A groan escaped me.

  “I will send somebody to dress those cuts. I wish I knew when we were leaving, but… I just wish I knew.”

  “Send someone pretty,” I called, but he was gone.

  *

  The days wore on my nerves, stretched into weeks. Kuwatna-ziti spent all the time he could with Himuili, which meant that I only saw him while we loitered from dawn to dusk at the palace and Tuthaliyas studiously ignored us. Each time a new docket was drawn up our names were appended to the end of it; we had no recourse but to await him. My mother went to Arinna, so that she might be there when Daduhepa’s time came upon her. Before she left, I asked her to convince my wife to accept my choice in the child’s naming. Eyes filled with tears, my mother said she would do what she could.

  Kantuzilis took it into his head to keep the Shepherd awake nights by evincing inordinate interest in Samuha and the faring of the Upper Country. He spent a whole day querying me of my exploits while Kuwatna-ziti fended off what he surely thought were leading questions, though where they were leading I had not the slightest idea. The veins showed through my uncle’s pale skin, and in the daylight he wore a cowled cloak; his eyes, red as his gums, were slitted with some private humor.

  “I cannot take another day of that,” muttered Kuwatna-ziti as we were checked out through the gate by a guard who waved friendlily – he knew us well enough. That night Kuwatna-ziti did not leave me for Himuili’s company, but took both me and the young commander on a tour of the better inns, spending silver like copper.

  Himuili was covered with hair. It fringed his fingers, his cheeks, peeked out from beneath his uniform’s short slit sleeves, curled about the leather braces on his wrists and up his neck to meet his black mane, cut square to give no handhold in close quarters. His eyes were startlingly large, with flecks of green in them, and doubtless accounted for his success with the women. We talked horses and chariots, and the placement of foot soldiers in the field.

  One of Tuthaliyas’ policies rankled him, and in that he had my concurrence. This policy, that of taking few namra, amounted in his eyes to massacre; with such sentiments I was wholeheartedly in agreement, but when I said so Kuwatna-ziti found that a piece of lamb had lodged in his throat.

  We were halfway through the meal when a winded Meshedi burst through the curtain into the alcove we had taken and announced that a message had come for me from Arinna and I might collect it at the palace. “What else?” demanded Himuili, when the Meshedi lingered. Kuwatna-ziti not raising his eyes stabbed at a chunk of meat on his plate with his dirk.

  “My lord, he is supposed to come with me. Now.”

  “Now?” echoed Himuili pensively, while Kuwatna-ziti ate, then, squinting at the Meshedi: “He will be along.”

  “Let him go,” growled Kuwatna-ziti. “There is nothing else to do.” He was chewing determinedly, staring at his plate.

  Something died of frostbite inside me. Behind the Meshedi I counted six others. “May the Oath Gods take you!” I cursed Kuwatna-ziti’s bowed head. My vision swam. I was tired of fighting them all.

  Himuili’s cautioning hand came down on my leg beneath the table. “What name have you, Meshedi?” he snapped. The man, straightening unconsciously, gave it. “Hear me, my lord marshal,” the light-eyed commander continued, “if you – personally – do not return the prince unharmed to my estate by the time the mid-watch call is heard, I will strangle you with your own entrails.”

  I slid out from under his hand, saying, “Take me, then,” to the Meshedi, knowing as well as anyone else there that Himuili’s threats were empty.

  When the six Meshedi had closed around me, I looked back through the crowd. Himuili’s head was bent to Kuwatna-ziti’s.

  I was in my own world on that march through the streets and into the residential palace. The Meshedi watched me warily, and kept their hands to themselves.

  They handed me over to the inner-sanctum Meshedi, most of whom were family, sons of concubines, cousins. But none of those spoke to me, nor I to them.

  He was in the King’s wing, in a newly refurbished room sweet with cedar. A priestess of the Sun Goddess of Arinna and a scribe were also there.

  The Meshedi marched me up before him where he sprawled in a chair carven grand like a throne, and stepped back.

  He drank long from a silver rhyton, disdaining the cup bearer who hovered behind him, and said, “Your wife is ill, a suitably winded messenger assures us. Convenient, do you not think?”

  “My lord? She is heavy with child.”

  He ran his ringed band across his lips. Even at that late hour, he wore the round-domed crown my father had favored. I wondered if he slept with it on, and said nothing more.

  “Why are you not petitioning me for leave to go to your wife?”

  “It would be a waste of breath.”

  He growled, half rose, then fastened his hands on his brocaded knees and sat back. “Just as well you know it. But I did bring you here for a reason. Will you have wine?”

  “No, my lord.” I looked at the priestess, waiting patiently. The Sun Goddess of Arinna regulates kingship and queenship. I felt some concern for Daduhepa, about how she would fare on her own. I glanced at the Meshedi out of the corner of my eye. Behind my back, the stout doors were closed. This room, one of the few so constructed, had no windows. Tuthaliyas well knew me.

  He shrugged, and swigged again, and smacked his lips. “Well, this is not how I had intended to do this, but let’s get on with it.”

  I stiffened, waiting for the blow to fall.

  The Meshedi closed in, the scribe knelt by Tuthaliyas’ throne, and the priestess came forward. She was halfway through the ritual when I realized it was my adoption, not my death, she commended to the numerous gods and goddesses whom she must invoke before the reason for their attendance could be revealed. I started visibly, raising my eyes to the King’s. He put his jeweled finger to his thick lips, but his gilded belly shook with suppressed laughter.

  When it was done he ordered them all out, even the Meshedi, and waved about him. “I wish I could offer you a chair, son.” There were none but his throne.

  Wondering if this were some further torture, some trick, I yearned for Kuwatna-ziti, then recollected his eyes, which could not meet mine.

  Then the Great King began to cackle. He chortled until tears came, until he wobbled on the seat of his kingship. “If only you could see your face,” he gasped. And, a time later: “I do you no favor, you know.”

  By then I had a cup in my hand. I sipped from it. “I know.”

  “The princes will be all over you now, but they’re off each other’s necks. And I have sh
ut your thrice-cursed mother up. I expect you to provide me with peace in the Upper Country. I do not want to hear a single grumble from the Arinnian lords – He thrust his chin toward me, round eyes swimming with drink. “Well, you little bastard, say something.”

  “What am I to call you, my lord?”

  “Don’t call me, and I will be as happy. I suppose you had better call me your father, to get people used to it. Bah! I hate dissembling! You understand what you have gained, and what you have not?”

  “I am not sure that I do.”

  “You are my son; I have need of an heir, if only to keep my brothers from murdering one another – and eager daggers from my own back. If I die and have named no tuhkanti, you can squabble with the others over my bones. For now, call yourself prince and strut your rank all you please in the Upper Country; I’m assigning you as permanent commander there. But hear this: when the Shepherd is a wolf, all the flock grows thin with fear; if this continues, evil comes to all.” He sprayed my face with his winy breath. “Take for me the Upper Country, and I will make you tuhkanti –” He cocked his head at something I did not hear, and staggered away from me. “You are growing chest-hair, and my pubic hair is falling out. That must mean something. What do you think…? Ah, here’s your adoption gift. Never let it be said that I am not a good father.”

  The doors opened inward. In marched Kantuzilis, my pale uncle, and Himuili, whom I had left with his lips to Kuwatna-ziti’s ear. Kantuzilis clothes were as bloody as his eyes. The commander Himuili’s usually impeccable attire was in disarray. Between them they bore a grisly burden which no longer lived, but which once had been part of a living body.

  Hard-eyed, Kantuzilis presented the head of his brother, Muwatalli the Elder, to the king for identification, while Himuili stood at ease, his hand on one cocked hip, his angular face impassive.

  “There you go son, and welcome,” said Tuthaliyas to me.

  Kantuzilis’ pale face drained paler as the Sun, with obvious relish, told them of my adoption. Then he commended them on their successful evening’s work, and dismissed us, all three.

  No one spoke until we stood outside the palace gate. Then Kantuzilis, his calm slipping momentarily, snarled at me that I would spend the short season of life remaining to me in Samuha, and stalked off.

  “I would say, Tasmisarri, that you have gained a father who cannot protect you from the new enemies you have made tonight.” Himuili squinted after the Pale One’s retreating form. “But I expected next to see you as dead as Muwatilli. Let us go shake Kuwatna-ziti from his mourning. Tuthaliyas is a serpent among serpents. This will set the lords back on their haunches. What did he say to you?”

  “Daduhepa!” I broke into a run. Himuili did not catch me until I burst in on Kuwatna-ziti, panting, demanding that he leave with me that instant for Arinna, where my wife languished close to death.

  The Shepherd sat by the low-burning hearth, his head in his hands. As I flung the door open he snapped to his feet, pale as Kantuzilis.

  “Tasmi!” Grabbing me, he swung me full about as Himuili skidded through the doorway. Behind him, more footsteps thudded: we had wakened the entire household.

  “But we must leave, now! I tell you, Daduhepa is –”

  “Perfectly all right. Hold still.” He held me in an embrace like a bear’s. “Look you, I had your mother send that message when she reached Arinna, in case we needed a reason to leave. I thought –” he said, as I scowled and shook him off, remembering his behavior when the Meshedi came for me, “– that it had worked too well, when they took you away.”

  “He gave me Muwatalli’s head.”

  “That’s nothing, he was going to collect it anyway – it was planned before you two arrived here,” put in Himuili. “Just a warning for the lords, and a way to clip Kantuzilis’ claws, it was. But tell Kuwatna-ziti, Tasmisarri, my lord, what else came to pass there.”

  I put my hand on the embrasure’s sill, leaning back against it. “Kuwatna-ziti, Tuthaliyas adopted me. A priestess of the Sun Goddess did it. He said it was no favor he did me.”

  “You know truth when you hear it. He wants you to stay in Samuha, I imagine. Hand him the Arinnian lords, too? Are you free to leave? Good. We’ll go by in the morning, and I’ll pay my respects, and we’ll be out of here.”

  “But Daduhepa…. We should leave.”

  “I told you, I made that up. If I had not, what would you do, hold her hand?”

  “I… I should be there. Anyway.”

  “Tomorrow, my lord prince. Tonight, we celebrate having survived today.”

  CHAP TER 4

  “Who performed the Festival of Haste, if Tuthaliyas stayed in Hattusas?” asked my mother, perturbed, as I paced the bed-sitting room of our house in Arinna. “Who accompanied the god to his stations? Who performed the sacrifices to the dead queens?”

  I struck a foppish pose for a moment, bent-wristed, and lisped one of my uncle’s names. She did not laugh: Tuthaliyas’ preferences were, to her, no laughing matter. Usually, a queen sacrifices to her predecessors. Hatti had no queen under Tuthaliyas. My mother had been sore distressed that, considering the circumstances, she had not been asked to make the tour with the god as he traveled to his stations in the different towns. But Tuthaliyas was smarter than that.

  “Tasmi, that is not nice,” she reproved me:

  “Do you think I care what is ‘nice’? The dead queens will survive going hungry this once. Now, by Istar of the Battlefield, if you do not make her see me, I am going to break the door down!” Daduhepa had given birth while I was in Hattusas. I had not seen it or her, nor would anyone tell me the child’s sex: Daduhepa had so decreed it.

  Kuwatna-ziti had driven as far as his own estates with me, departing with a promise to meet me in Samuha. His audience with Tuthaliyas had not pleased him: he had not been released from his oath concerning me, nor had any of the boons he had sought from the Great King been granted. Worse, Himuili had received the permanent appointment Kuwatna-ziti had held temporarily, and so by Tuthilayas’ inscrutable will, the Shepherd and I were now equals – in the sight of the armies, at least.

  Using Daduhepa’s petulance as an excuse, my mother followed me everywhere. In my wife’s behalf, she even watched me with a critical eye as I stripped and bathed, meanwhile extracting from me all that had happened in Hattusas. Upon hearing that Tuthaliyas had adopted me, she sank down upon the imported Egyptian settee that dominated Daduhepa’s sitting room, far from pleased, silent as if the Storm God had struck her dumb.

  “Go see if she is awake yet; tell her she must admit me,” I pleaded, touching the polished sun disk of the Goddess. It was a princely house, in all but truth: the servants ignored me as if I were made of smoke; I could not even get a meal out of them without Asmunikal’s word behind me. And my mother seemed to think of the place as one of her own villas. I had been in her rooms; she was packed in for a long stay, had even brought my brother Zida along.

  “Tasmi, when she is ready to see you, she will let us know.”

  “How is she? At least you could tell me that. The message you sent –”

  “She will be glad to hear of your concern.” Asmunikal set a copper pin more firmly in her hair. “Did you know Zida will enter the Meshedi at New Year?”

  “It is past time he crawled out from between your legs. It’s three years late, if you ask me.”

  “How dare you! Your brother –”

  “There. Did you hear that? She is awake in there!” I strode over to my mother and took her by the elbow, propelling her to the door. “She’ll see me whether she wills it or no.” I said. “Now!”

  “Ruffian!” Asmunikal jerked her arm free and pushed me away, her smooth brow uncreased. “Go sit and wait.” She pointed firmly to the settee.

  I stared a long time at the bulls carved above the doorway.

  Within, a baby cried and I tried to determine whether it was a girl or boy that howled its displeasure to the world.

  When the screaming cea
sed, my mother emerged, holding one door open for me. Once inside, I pulled it from her grasp and locked her out.

  Daduhepa, her high-chinned face drawn and unsmiling, held a small, red baby with a bush of black hair to her breast. It suckled noisily, pumping her teat with tiny hands.

  I strode to the bedside, where the both of them lay swaddled, to see if I could tell whether or not it was a boy. I could not tell.

  “Do not touch me.”

  “I want to see –”

  “Do not touch him either. What do you want?”

  “Daduhepa, please. I came as soon as I could.”

  “Do you think I care?” The baby gurgled. I stood stupidly with my hand outstretched, wiped it against my hip and wished I had not come. The little red thing kicked her belly, trying to climb her. “No one said you could sit down.” Daduhepa’s eyes were very bright.

  I seized her free hand and held it against her struggles. “How are you?”

  It was the wrong thing to say. She screamed at me and exploded into a flurry of covers.

  “This is how I am! Look at me! You did this to me! I’m torn asunder inside from your little brat!” She reared up on her knees amid the covers, naked, the child pressed to her swollen udder.

  She was not easy on my eyes, her belly yet hanging in folds from the child. I took her and the little squirming thing to my breast; after a time her struggles ceased, and she and the child both wailed in my arms.”

  When she quieted him, she called him ‘Arnuwandas,’ and my heart warmed. So I kissed her eyes and her throat and told her that things would mend with us. Then I proved it. When I had done with her, she plucked my son up from his little bed and asked me if I did not think he was beautiful, and if I did not think he looked like me, then put him into my arms. She had been wide as a cow inside, and as flaccid: stretched from him. I scowled down at little Arnuwandas.